When 'Money In The Bag' slowly burned onto porn soundtracks, crime documentaries and over late night airwaves, Kraak & Smaak were plotting the next stage of their assault. Reaching back into their work bank, Wim Plug, Oscar De Jong and Mark Kneppers decided to put the finest cuts together in one album to form 'The Remix Selection'. Jamiroquai and Max Sedgley remixes may keep the chin strokers of the dancefloor elite nodding in approval, but how does their live show measure up? Fairly well, if critics the world over are to be believed. The Dutch three piece sold out one of L.A.'s most prestigious clubs, earned an army of respectable fans in Britain and are flying high in their native country. So where did it all go right?

At home your name means 'crunchy and tasty' but here in England it means something quite different! Did you ever consider changing your name or do you enjoy the different meanings that can be taken from it?
Oh dear… we could see that one coming… Apart from beer and wine we don’t do drugs. It is something we run into now and then, explaining it over and over again; we have thought about it but it would be strange to change your name in the middle of the process of having an album out and doing a lot of shows. It’s a great sounding, original name and in this way it gives us some extra publicity as well. So, as far as we are concerned it’s not really an issue.

How would you describe your sound? House? Funk? Breakbeat? Or something new and different?
We don’t really feel restricted by styles, so we guess it’s a mix of everything really. Most importantly though, all our music seems to have a distinctive original sound (or at least that is what people tend to tell us all the time!) and musicality that perhaps goes further than the average dance or loungey record you hear. And it appeals to both underground lovers and the greater ‘pop’ public it seems. That doesn’t mean at all that we’re not influenced by other music; we listen to a lot of different things, either DJ or other stuff, from dubstep to electro, jazz, minimal, breakbeat, etc. Maybe next time we’ll end up with a rock album! (Err… well, probably not…)

As we hadn’t played live before in the US before we were a bit depending on the buzz that we created with our earlier US DJ tour, the album and our live shows in Europe, but we were pleasantly surprised that we managed to almost sell out one of the major clubs in LA when we were there, the El Rey. Anyway, it’s really weird to meet fans at the other end of the world who know all your music an even more so if they really dig it! Still, you have to put up a good show and if we failed there it would have put us a couple of steps back. In that sense we think the Dutch music and club scene provides a very good basis for acts and bands like us: people are very critical over here and very hard to please, both for DJ’s and live bands. But if you win them over you have them ‘in the bag’.

A lot goes on in your live shows. Is it difficult to put what you created in the studio onto the stage?

It is quite a process actually. On stage, we don’t want to sound just like a traditional happy live funk band or, at the other hand, like a passively operating electronic dance act. We try to combine the best of both worlds: performing our music live by an energetic band while retaining the clubby flavour of the studio album sound. Many of the tracks played live have evolved from the album versions in terms of more or less different arrangements and vocals: live shows have another dynamic than listening to an album or dancing to club 12”es, so we have to take that into account. The band members also play an active role in that development by suggesting arrangements, breaks, fills, etc.

You toured with Faithless, who have been around for a long time and also put on a great live show. Did you learn anything from them?

They seem to have taken a similar route as we did: first producing club music, releasing 12”s and so forth, and after some time they decided to start a live show. While of course it is a far bigger production than is the case with us, it shows that dance acts can grow into something that appeals to club, rock and pop audiences with the right songs and tunes, ideas, etc. It’s great and to have been able to have a look at that backstage; respect!

What’s the strangest thing you have seen whilst performing live/touring?
Last winter we were in the middle of a live gig in a Dutch club when there was citywide electricity fallout. So there we were with about 500 people staring us in the face with all the music gone dead, in the white generator lights ….Very naked! And just the other day at a big open air festival in Holland Wim got his fingertips burnt because the CD players he scratched with stood in the hot burning sun. He got blisters on two of his fingers and for the next couple of gigs he had to tape ‘em up.

We are working on the new album of course and hope to have it out before the end of the year but because of the many DJ and live shows it has taken more time than expected. All of our remixes have that distinctive K&S sound so we knew that there was an album worth of material just waiting to be released. These remixes are often hard to find, sometimes only on promo or limited 12” and a lot of people haven’t heard them before. We played with them for a long time sequencing it like an artist album and we’re really happy with the results. What’s more, we still also have loads of short beats, breaks, soundscapes and snippets, but a bit more Madlib / Stones Throw style. We still need to put out those as well!

How did you decide which tracks to use? Were there any disagreements between the group about what material to use and what to leave out?

We discussed all our remixes up until now and some of them didn’t pass the test of time, so we left them out. At first we had only one CD in mind but we concluded in the end that there was enough material to fill two CD’s, loosely based on two themes: one more for listening at home (‘smaak’) and one more dance floor beats orientated (‘kraak’). It was great to be able to use the Jamiroquai remixes, we didn’t think it was possible to clear those at first.

The videos for ‘Keep Me Home’ and ‘Money in the Bag’ are very creative. Do you have much input in the process of the making of these? Does the same go for your album artwork?
We have input into who we work with and the initial ideas but after that and as we get busier and busier – you have to trust other professionals to do their jobs well. It’s not always easy to let that go but we’re very happy with the people who have made the artwork and the videos up until now; we feel they really reflect the music that we make and the ‘not so serious image’ we want to stress.

'Money In The Bag' was used over a sex scene in a Dutch film! It obviously wasn’t intended for use on a soundtrack, but when you make music, do you ever picture the scenario it will be played in? E.g. is it purely for the club, the after party, etc?
When we work on new tunes we generally already quickly feel in which direction a track is heading in terms of style, broadly speaking either for the dance floor or for listening. When that’s clear we’ll try and arrange and tune it appropriately to that vibe. But after releasing they sort of find their own way, i.e. with the Money in the Bag track, which we heard back in the scene you mentioned but also under a news item on banking!

 

What can we expect from your next album?
It will probably be a bit more electronic than the first one but essentially with the same bandwidth of styles and the same attitude. And now that we have built up a bit of a name for ourselves with the ‘Boogie Angst’ album and our remixes, it’s become easier to ask other artists to collaborate with us, so you can also expect a couple of guest vocalists if all goes well.

We had to make a decision that if we were going to get our second album out this year we wouldn’t be able to play live too much this summer. We are still doing some DJ shows and we have a couple of the big European Festivals booked. We haven’t toured the UK extensively yet, so that’s the first thing we have planned for when the albums finished.